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Erin Jo Richey:
This is relevant to my interests. "Share: the icon no one agrees on." https://bold.pixelapse.com/minming/share-the-icon-no-one-agrees-on

@erinjo perhaps the difficulty in creating an effective icon stems from the fact that the physical metaphors associated with “share” do not map well to the online behaviour associated with the term, allowing the word to be used successfully but making giving it an image a challenge.

My theory: the most basic usage of “share” generally refers to organising mutual access to some resource between pre-determined, consenting participants (he shared his food with him, she shared her connection with her coworkers, the schools shared a playing field). This holds for more abstract non-physical use of “share”, as in “she shared her story”, ”they shared a secret”.

In some cases (e.g. private messaging [where the verb “message” or “send” would more often be used] or posting to a group) the “known participants” facet holds up, but not so much the pre-determination and/or mutual consent/awareness present in the physical examples — unless for example the context is an online group set up explicitly for the sharing of links to resources about a topic.

In the common case of “sharing” as it’s characterised online (posting a short text post containing a link and optionally some comment, typically with a link preview, broadcast to a wide audience on a whim with no mutual pre-determination), not much of the original metaphor holds up, and I’d argue that “post” is a more suitable term (“publish” less so as its use connotes posting of a thought-out original work).

None of this is backed up by actual data though — I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

There’s something incredibly satisfying, if a little masochistic, about poring over PIC datasheets and manpages, and tinkering with low-level code you only half understand, when it all actually works and you get two devices to talk to each other (in this case a PIC16F886 and a Raspberry Pi, via I2C)

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Bret Victor:
How can you call the web a publishing medium when your bookshelf can just vanish? URLs and HTTP are a disaster. Doesn't have to be this way.

@worrydream “bookshelf” is completely the wrong mental model. A “list of links” is like a list of postal addresses of places (hence web “address”) as a physical analogy, or the contents of their authors brains as a human analogy. Complaining about their contents changing/disappearing is as complaining that space/time/humans are “a disaster” (which admittedly may broadly be true).

“your bookshelf” is whatever personal archives you make of your favourite things (analogies: photos, notes, physical books), and therefore the solution is better personal archival tools. I’ve made a start — my website automatically takes an archive of every page I link to and stores it as HTML+HTTP headers in the filesystem, which has proven to be a quite robust format.

Of course if you actually have a practical idea about how to improve on the infrastructure of the web, speak up and/or build it :)

Edit: reflecting on this, “completely the wrong mental model” is incorrect, and better expressed as “a mental model which is inconsistent with reality”. There are no “wrong” mental models, only a variety of co-existing metaphors with varying levels and areas of consistency with reality.

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Ben Werdmüller:
21st century politician to watch: @stellacreasy (whose icon is her dressed as Boba Fett), v actively engaging on social media. The future.

.@benwerd talked to any politicians about Known? I realised recently that politics is, broadly speaking, the battle for ideas, fought with language on the field of mass media. I’d much rather the field was platforms which belonged to citizens, rather than states or corporations. Social media is a start, but #indieweb principals can go much further.

Reading Lakoff+Johnson on time metaphors, wondering if the way we use the two main inconsistent metaphors (time as objects passing by a stationary observer vs time as a landscape through which an observer passes) has personality side effects, as one is a metaphor where the observer is helpless, whereas in the other the observer is in control.

The things which have always inspired me the most to create have always been tools and reference rather than exemplar examples elevated on pedestals. Want to inspire people? Build tools and documentation.